Nanoscale assembly of superconducting vortices with scanning tunnelling microscope tip

Abstract

Vortices play a crucial role in determining the properties of superconductors as well as their applications. Therefore, characterization and manipulation of vortices, especially at the single vortex level, is of great importance. Among many techniques to study single vortices, scanning tunneling microscopy (STM) stands out as a powerful tool, due to its ability to detect the local electronic states and high spatial resolution. However, local control of superconductivity as well as the manipulation of individual vortices with the STM tip is still lacking. Here we report a new function of the STM, namely to control the local pinning in a superconductor through the heating effect. Such effect allows us to quench the superconducting state at nanoscale, and leads to the growth of vortex-clusters whose size can be controlled by the bias voltage. We also demonstrate the use of an STM tip to assemble single quantum vortices into desired nanoscale configurations.

5 figures, supplementary information is available online

References in corpus (5)

• Mechanics of Individual, Isolated Vortices in a Cuprate Superconductor
• Observation of Lattice and Andreev Bound States of Vortices in Ba0.6K0.4Fe2As2 Single Crystals with Scanning Tunneling Microscopy/Spectroscopy
• Enhancement of long range correlations in a 2D vortex lattice by incommensurate 1D disorder potential
• Visualizing landscapes of the superconducting gap in heterogeneous superconductor thin films: geometric influences on proximity effects
• Dramatic role of critical current anisotropy on flux avalanches in MgB2 films

Cited by in corpus (5)

• Paramagnetic Meissner effect in ZrB12 single crystal with non-monotonic vortex-vortex interactions
• Direct visualization of vortex ice in a nanostructured superconductor
• Fabrication of on-chip probes for double-tip scanning tunneling microscopy
• The importance of thermal gradients on the vortex dynamics and magnetic behavior of mesoscopic superconducting samples
• Scalable Gate-Defined Majorana Fermions in 2D p-Wave Superconductors